Count Total Number of XmlNodes in C#

I'm trying to find a way to get the total number of child nodes from an XmlNode recursively.

That it is to say I want to count all the children, grand children etc.

I think its something like

node.SelectNodes(<fill in here>).Count

but I don't know what the XPath is.

XPath supports something called Axis specifier, so the code you're looking for is

node.SelectNodes("descendant::*").Count

The XPath you are after is:

descendant::node() (1)

or

descendant::* (2)

The first XPath expresion (1) above selects any node (text-node, processing-instruction, comment, element) in the subtree rooted by the current node.

(2) selects any element node in the subtree rooted by the current node.

using System.Xml.Linq;

node.DescendantNodes().Count();

If you're doing an unfiltered count, which your question implies, you could just traverse the them using the ChildNodes property:

private int CountChildren(XmlNode node)
{
   int total = 0;

   foreach (XmlNode child in node.ChildNodes)
   {
      total++;
      total += CountChildren(child);
   }
   return total;
}

You could use somthing like this:

private static int CountNodes(XmlNode node)
{
    int count = 0;

    foreach (XmlNode childNode in node.ChildNodes)
    {
        count += CountNodes(childNode);
    }

    return count + node.ChildNodes.Count;
}

I think this will do it for you though not through xPath:

void CountNode(XmlNode node, ref int count)
{
    count += node.ChildNodes.Count;

    foreach (XmlNode child in node.ChildNodes)
    {
        CountNode(child, ref count);
    }
}

For reference here is a link to the count function in xpath.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256103.aspx

so if you were looking for all the same type of nodes you could do

//Your_node

to select all the nodes

//*